Rosa
Luxemburg was a brilliant theorist, whose classic The Accumulation of Capital — an essential Marxist work on imperialism
— continues to be a resource for those who want to understand the world in
which we live. (This is something on which I will share my thoughts in another
session). But she was committed not only to understanding the world but also
to changing it. I want to concentrate here on her thinking about how to do
this.

Born
into a well-to-do and highly cultured family that would nurture the critical
intelligence of this exceptionally bright daughter, Rosa came into the world on
March 5, 1871 — just before insurgent workers of Paris rose up to establish
their heroic and short-lived Commune. Of course, Rosa
was Polish, not French, but the dual revolution of democratic aspiration and industrial
capitalist transformation was generating the rise of the socialist movement
on a global scale. She was drawn into the revolutionary movement in Poland
before she was fifteen years old. Even as she was completing her formal
academic education which culminated in a doctorate in economics at the University of Zurich, she was being trained and
tempered in the Marxist underground. Her closest comrades were professional
revolutionaries and working-class intellectuals whose lives were an idealistic
and passionate blend of revolutionary agitation and organizing, intensive
education and analysis, seasoned with debates and polemics, sometimes punctuated
by strikes or insurrections, and often laced with prison and martyrdom.[1]

Central
to Rosa Luxemburg’s strategic orientation for achieving global justice was the
commitment to the liberation struggles of the working-class majority. Those
whose lives and labor keep society running are the ones who should run society.
It is the great majority of the people who must shape the future. “Socialism
cannot be made and will not be made by command, not even by the best and most
capable Socialist government,” she insisted. “It must be made by the masses,
through every proletarian individual.”[2]

When
we try to look at the labor movement to which Rosa Luxemburg belonged, we are
at a serious disadvantage. We tend to superimpose our own experience, or our
lack of experience blended with various abstract notions, over the living
reality of the German workers’ movement, in which she became involved more than
a century ago. There are relatively few studies that try to give a real sense
of that movement, and there are very few attempts to connect such things with
the biography and ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. In my comments here I want to
utilize one of those rare studies — Mary Nolan’s Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf.
And I will make special reference to one of the local working-class activists
described in that study — Peter Berten, who was in his mid-20s when Luxemburg
burst on the scene of left-wing German politics in the late 1890s, and in his
mid-40s when she was killed by right-wing death squads in 1919.[3]

Luxemburg’s
views on the labor movement corresponded to those of Karl Marx. She embraced
(as did most German Social Democrats) the orientation presented in the Communist Manifesto — that the workers
should struggle for various reforms to expand democratic rights and improve
immediate economic and social conditions, that they should build increasingly
effective and inclusive trade unions to secure better working conditions and
higher living standards, that they should build their own working-class
political party. She accepted Marx’s view that the workers’ party should
struggle to “win the battle for democracy” — winning political power in order
to make “despotic inroads” into the capitalist economy for the purpose of
bringing about the socialist reconstruction of society. And like Marx,
Luxemburg believed that the defenders of the old social order would not permit
a peaceful and gradual transition to socialism — that they would unleash
violence (perhaps sooner rather than later) to preserve their privileges, and
they would have to be overcome through the revolutionary struggle of the
workers and their allies.[4]

The
specifics of Luxemburg’s political orientation assumed the existence of a mass
working-class movement that included but went beyond trade unions. There was a
vibrant labor press, a network of cooperatives, a political party, and a
growing array of cultural institutions.

Young
Peter Berten, who completed elementary school and then learned cabinetmaking
from his father, for much of his young adulthood was an itinerant journeyman
moving from job to job in various cities in the Lower
Rhine, and soon he became a militant of the woodworkers union. After
participating in “lively political discussions at union meetings” over a period
of a few years, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and the
young worker proved to be a capable and dedicated organizer and agitator for
the socialist cause. By 1904, Berten was a central leader of the SPD in Düsseldorf,
sometimes serving as the organization’s paid secretary, and in 1908 he became
the editor of the local newspaper of the Düsseldorf socialists, the Volkszeitung, which had a subscription
base of 6000.[5]

In
this period trade union membership in Düsseldorf rose from 5400 in 1903 to
almost 25,000 in 1912, with SPD membership rising from 950 to more than 7000 in
the same years, about 98% of whom were working class. The SPD vote in Düsseldorf
rose from 20,000 in 1903 to more than 42,000 — just under 50% of all Düsseldorf’s
votes — in 1912. In 1909 a Volkshaus (or People’s House) — a political and
cultural center — was opened by the local SPD, “a home where workers are
master,” Peter Berten wrote proudly, “and not dependent on the goodwill of
speculating parasites … a home where they can raise themselves above the misery
of daily life, if only for a few hours.” In addition to trade unions and the political
party, more than 2000 workers participated in a consumer cooperative, and more
than 8000 each year took advantage of legal and social service advisors offered
by the Düsseldorf workers movement. Hundreds participated in workers education
courses (“to expand people’s knowledge in the class struggle,” as one SPD
militant emphasized, dealing with such topics as history, economics, and Marxism).
Sometimes thousands each year attended SPD forums on important issues facing
the working class, and public protests rallying workers — according to SPD
flyers — “to do everything possible to improve the condition of the working
class and eliminate capitalism.”[6]

Not
all of Germany
was Düsseldorf, but Düsseldorf was not unique. And this reflected the context
in which Luxemburg functioned. And we will see that her ideas reflected this
context, and resonated among many who were part of this labor movement. It is
worth emphasizing what is hard for many of us in the United States to remember. The
labor movement is much more than the unions. Twenty percent of Düsseldorf
workers were in unions, but the ratio of union members to party members shifted
from 13 trade unionists for every 1 party member in 1901, to just 5 to 1 by
1907, and 3 to 1 in 1912. Even so, SPD leaders like Berten complained that too
many workers remained “just trade unionists.” [7]

An
aspect of this dilemma was discussed by Luxemburg in 1904 in the following
manner:

The
international movement of the proletariat toward its complete emancipation is a
process peculiar in the following respect. For the first time in the history of
civilization, the people are expressing their will consciously and in
opposition to all ruling classes. But this can only be satisfied beyond the
limits of the existing system.

Now
the mass can only acquire and strengthen this will in the course of the
day-to-day struggle against the existing social order — that is, within the
limits of capitalist society.

On
the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located
outside of existing society. On one hand, we have the day-to-day struggle; on
the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectical
contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way.

It
follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the
two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its
mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of
sinking back into the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a
movement of bourgeois social reform.[8]

That
dilemma relates to a crisis that developed in the German Social Democracy. A
strong tendency developed among the national trade union leadership — members
of the SPD, but leading relatively strong union organizations the majority of
whose members were not SPD members, organizations whose primary goal was to
secure higher wages and better working conditions within the context of the
capitalist economy. These trade union leaders wanted to bring the SPD under the
control of the unions, to prevent revolutionary-minded socialists from pushing
the unions in a more radical direction, and instead getting the SPD to advance
the moderate trade union agenda. A layer of the SPD functionaries wanted to go
in this moderate direction, which they hoped would help the party accumulate
votes of non-radical (and to some extent non-working-class) layers of the
population.[9]

The
tension between revolutionaries and reformists cropped up over and over, with
greater intensity — for example, in 1908 around courses that Luxemburg and
others were teaching at the recently-established CentralPartySchool
in Berlin. Paul
Frolich tells us that the more than 200 students who had attended the school
came from “a colorful variety of backgrounds: next to raw youngsters who had
only a smattering of socialism, but had distinguished themselves in one way or
another in their work for the party, there were old and experienced party
workers. They represented a very wide variety of occupations: mechanics,
carpenters, decorators, miners, party secretaries, trade unionists, housewives,
intellectuals. Most of them had derived their knowledge of socialism only from
agitational pamphlets, and were not used to systematic thought.” Peter Nettl
records that her students responded to Luxemburg’s classes with enthusiasm:
“She was a natural and enthusiastic teacher, clarifying the most complicated
philosophical issues of Marxism with lively similes and illustrations, making
the subject not only real but important.”[10]

Those
who feared that the wrong kind of workers’ education was being conducted at the
school demanded that more practical matters take the place of revolutionary
abstractions. “Do the masses have to know the theory of value? Do the masses
need to know what the materialist theory of history is?” asked Kurt Eisner, who
answered his own question with the comment that such stuff has no direct value
and can even be harmful for working-class activists, concluding: “Theory
frequently has the actual effect of killing the power to come to conclusions
and to take action.”Luxemburg’s retort
drew enthusiastic applause at the 1908 Party Congress: “They think the
materialist conception of history, as they understand it, has on them the
effect of crippling their ability to act and they therefore think that theory
should not be taught at the Party School, but hard facts, the hard facts of life.
They haven’t the faintest idea that the proletariat knows the hard facts from
its everyday life, the proletariat knows the ‘hard facts’ better than Eisner. What
the masses lack is general enlightenment, the theory which gives us the
possibility of systematizing the hard facts and forging them into a deadly
weapon to use against our opponents.” [11]

Peter
Berten was a student at the BerlinPartySchool
in 1906, and the classes he took with Luxemburg — he later acknowledged —
taught him that “one cannot talk of an automatic development from a capitalist
economy to a socialist one. Capitalism lays the basis for a socialist society
but the working class must bring it about.” Berten’s views — as a leader of the SPD in Düsseldorf,
and as the editor of the Volkszeitung
— closely corresponded to the outlook of Luxemburg. He denounced those who were
trying, as he put it, to turn the SPD into “a bourgeois radical reform party,”
insisting that “we have no cause to give up our principles and our tactics. The
capitalist system with its injuries cannot be eliminated by concessions to the
ruling class and its government.” He explained that the SPD was radical in the Lower Rhine, and reformist revisionism could not secure a
foothold there, “because the economic and political pressures that bear down on
the workers in our region are so strong. Through them the masses are forged
together and learn class consciousness and revolutionary thinking.” Yet there were fluctuations in working-class
consciousness. In 1913, after SPD electoral victories in Düsseldorf, he was
warning that “some of our comrades seem to be of the opinion that since we won
the Reichstag election everything has been achieved… Most believe that they
have fulfilled their responsibilities if they pay their dues and attend an
occasional meeting.” But the combination of seeking petty reforms while
passively waiting for the revolution, Berten insisted, “cannot possibly inspire
and sweep along the masses. Only great goals can waken enthusiasm and a
willingness to sacrifice.”[12]

In
Berten’s opinion, “Only a revolutionary tactic, which always builds on the
reality of class conflict and appeals to the elemental power of the masses, can
waken the energy, activism, and enthusiasm of the exploited proletariat.” He
emphasized in the Volkszeitung that
“the mass strike is the method of struggle which is most suited to the social
position of the proletariat.” In his
opinion: “What the proletariat possesses, in addition to its chains, is the
power that does not disappear through struggle. Rather it grows until it
suffices to break the chains.” Mary Nolan reports that “Berten and several
other functionaries were the most vociferous proponents of the mass strike, but
their ideas found a sympathetic echo among comrades locally and regionally.”[13]

As
Luxemburg explained it, the workings and contradictions of capitalism can
sometimes result in what she called a “violent and sudden jerk which disturbs
the momentary equilibrium of everyday social life,” aggravating “deep-seated,
long-suppressed resentment” among workers and other social layers, resulting in
an explosive and spontaneous reaction on a mass scale — in the form of strikes
spreading through an industry and sometimes involving many, most, or all
occupations and workplaces in one or more regions. Such mass strikes can go far
beyond economic issues, sometimes involving whole communities in mass
demonstrations and street battles, and are the means by which workers seek to
“grasp at new political rights and attempt to defend existing ones.” Once such strikes begin, there can occur
tremendous solidarity, discipline, and effective organization. But they have an
elemental quality which defies any notion of revolutionary blueprints being
drawn up in advance. Luxemburg believed that Social Democrats (whom she defined
as “the most enlightened, most class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat”)
should play an active role not only when such explosions occur, but also
beforehand in helping to educate and organize more and more workers in preparation
for such developments, which would enable Social Democrats to assume leadership
of the whole movement. She by no means believed that such upsurges would
necessarily result in socialist revolution. But neither did she believe that
they would wreck labor organizations. Rather, in her words, they became “the
starting point of a feverish work of organization.” While labor and socialist
bureaucrats might “fear that the organizations will be shattered in a
revolutionary whirlwind like rare porcelain,” Luxemburg’s observations of
actual mass strikes during 1905–1906 in Eastern Europe showed that the opposite
is the case: “From the whirlwind and the storm, out of the fire and glow of the
mass strike and the street fighting rise again, like Venus from the foam, fresh,
young, powerful, buoyant trade unions.” Some segments of the working class
cannot be unionized through “the form of quiet, systematic, partial trade union
struggles,” she noted, and her words drive home the point that “a powerful and
reckless fighting action of the proletariat, born of a revolutionary situation,
must surely react upon the deeper-lying layers and ultimately draw all those
into a general economic struggle who, in normal times, stand aside from the
daily trade union fight.”[14]

Luxemburg’s
revolutionary orientation resonated throughout much of the German labor
movement. There were, however, powerful
trade union leaders who despised her. They were insulted by her comment that
trade union struggles can only be like the labor of Sisyphus (rolling the
boulder up a hill, only to have capitalist dynamics push the gains back down
again), and that only socialism will secure permanent gains for the working
class. Of course, she added that it is necessary
for trade unions to wage that struggle in order to defend and improve the
workers’ conditions in the here-and-now. But this did not make up for her
barbed observation that “the specialization of professional activity as
trade-union leaders, as well as the naturally restricted horizon which is bound
up with disconnected economic struggles in a peaceful period, leads only too
easily, among trade union officials, to bureaucratism and a certain narrowness
of outlook.” She was specific: first, there was “an overvaluation of the [trade
union] organization, which from a means has been gradually been changed into an
end in itself, a precious thing, to which the interests of the struggles should
be subordinated,” and second “the trade union leaders, constantly absorbed in
the economic guerrilla war whose plausible task it is to make the workers place
the highest value on the smallest economic achievement, every increase in wages
and shortening of the working day, gradually lose the power of seeing the
larger connections and taking a survey of the whole position” facing the
working class.[15]

But
other trade unionists, a left-wing dissident current which Peter Berten and
others represented, appreciated her approach to struggling for reforms
(relevant to workplace struggles no less than to parliamentary struggles) — the
notion that an uncompromising militancy will gain more than an allegedly
“practical-minded” moderation. If one wants a shorter work day, for example,
and one hears that the bourgeois politicians (or managerial negotiators) are
prepared to favor a ten-hour workday but not an eight-hour workday, one should
not offer to form an alliance with them in favor of a ten-hour day. One should
instead engage in a militant struggle for the eight-hour day as the best means
for pressuring them into actually coming up with their ten-hour compromise. This
also builds a class-conscious militancy necessary for future struggles.

This
orientation comes through even in the way that Luxemburg talks about May Day in
1913. She said: “The brilliant basic idea of May Day is the autonomous,
immediate stepping forward of the proletarian masses, the political mass action
of the millions of workers who otherwise are atomized by the barriers of the
state in the day-to-day parliamentary affairs, who mostly can give expression
of their own will only through the ballot, through the election of their
representatives.” Noting the rising tide
of imperialist exploitation and violence, she concluded that “the more the idea
of May Day, the idea of resolute mass actions as a manifestation of international
unity, and as a means of struggle for peace and for socialism, takes root in
the strongest troops of the International, the German working class, the
greater is our guarantee that out of the world war which, sooner or later, is
unavoidable, will come forth a definite and victorious struggle between the
world of labor and of capital.”[16].

Despite
considerable lip-service given to Marxist theory and socialist goals, the
German Social Democratic Party “looks damn bad—completely headless... No one leads
it, no one shoulders responsibility,” as she put it. Instead there was
organizational routinism, there was a focus on winning more elections to put
more socialist politicians into parliament where they maneuvered and bargained
for limited reforms, and there was the growing influence of a powerful trade
union leadership focused on winning piecemeal concessions within the existing
social order. Such things tended to remove the masses of workers as an active
factor in the struggle for a better future, keeping them under “the heel [as
she put it] of the old authorities and, what’s more, to the upper strata of
opportunist [socialist] editors, [parliamentary] deputies, and trade union
leaders.”

In
the following year, Luxemburg and her revolutionary comrades found themselves
trapped in the left-wing of a bureaucratized mass party which, when World War I
erupted in 1914, supported the brutalizing imperialist war effort instead of
organizing working-class resistance. More than this, its leaders looked with
relief upon the imprisonment of Rosa Luxemburg for anti-war activity. In the
aftermath of the war, as the working-class radicalization foreseen by Luxemburg
gathered momentum, the Social-Democratic bureaucracy was able to divert much of
the proletarian militancy into “safe” channels. Luxemburg and the most
committed revolutionaries were first blocked and then expelled, left without an
adequate revolutionary instrument of their own. Amid the rising proletarian
ferment and counterrevolutionary violence of late 1918 and early 1919, they
were forced to begin rebuilding an organization.

In
1917 Lenin and the Bolsheviks, thanks to the working-class and peasant upsurge
in their own country, and thanks also to years of serious organizational
development had succeeded in establishing a revolutionary workers’ government
in Russia and appealed for the spread of revolutions throughout Europe, and
beyond Europe, but in highly industrialized Germany most of all. Increasing
numbers of German workers and war-weary soldiers responded with enthusiasm (so,
for that matter, did Rosa Luxemburg, who soon was released from prison). This
coincided with the collapse of the German war effort, and the collapse of the
monarchy. It seemed that Germany
was on the verge of socialist revolution—but the only substantial
organizational expression of socialism in the country was the German Social
Democratic Party which by now was in the hands of the worst of opportunistic
bureaucrats who were far more hostile to working-class revolution than to their
own landed aristocrats and big business interests. The result was a compact
between the Social Democratic leadership and the German economic elite, also
involving the top levels of the old governmental and military apparatus, to
preserve as much of the old social order as possible, masked for a short while
with socialist and democratic rhetoric.

In
order to win the radicalized masses to a genuinely revolutionary socialist
alternative, Luxemburg and others formed the Spartakusbund—the Spartacus League (named after the leader of the
great slave revolt that shook the Roman empire) — which was not strong enough
to lead the workers to a revolutionary victory. At the same time, it is
important not to under-rate the Spartakusbund.
Historian William Pelz, argues that “by war’s end, Spartakus had grown into an
organization of thousands with influence in numerous working class areas.” Since Pelz has inquired more carefully than
most into the nature and dimensions of this movement that Luxemburg led, it is
worth considering more of what he has to say in his fine study The Spartakusbund and the German Working
Class Movement 1914–1919:

Struggling
underground, the Spartakusbund was able to grow, propagate its ideas and
develop linkages with like-minded revolutionary groups and individuals, based
heavily in urban industrial areas. Thus, Luxemburg, [Karl] Liebknecht and the
other Spartakusbund leaders directed what was the heart of a growing
revolutionary workers movement. Young, active and concentrated in the most
modern vital sections of the economy, Spartakusbund members were to prove the
revolutionary voice within the ideological vacuum [which the bureaucratized
leadership of the German] Social Democracy labored to maintain.[17]

This
suggests that if Luxemburg, Liebknecht and other key Spartakus leaders had not
met their deaths in 1919, then around them a powerful, self-confident,
increasingly experienced leadership core would have crystallized to lead a
growing German Communist Party to victory in, say, 1920 or 1923, when genuine
revolutionary possibilities emerged. This would have rescued the Russian
Revolution from the isolation that would soon generate Stalinism, at the same
time preventing the possibility of the rise of Hitlerism in Germany.

From
the standpoint of those determined to preserve the old social order, Rosa
Luxemburg could not be allowed to live. The fact that she was a woman, and that
her life had included — on her own terms — sensual love and revolutionary
activity, made her a special target. The cultural and political reactionaries
of her time were fixated on the sexuality and political subversion represented
by this “Jewish slut” who was the repulsive “bloody Rosa,” someone fit to be
murdered in the so-called “Spartakus days” of January 1919, when—against Luxemburg’s
warnings—revolutionary euphoria led her comrades into an ultraleft collision
with a better organized, better armed, powerful enemy that had been waiting for
an opportunity to unleash the death squads of the so-called Freikorps.

But
Luxemburg’s vibrant, passionate life and intelligence are with us still in her
writings, which continue to have an amazing relevance to the realities that we
face today. I think this comrade would want us to give serious thought to the
question of what we can do to help change the world to a place in which the
free development of each person would be the condition for the development of
all. This conference — in which we are collectively seeking to learn the
lessons of Luxemburg’s ideas and activities, and to apply them to our own time —
not only does honor to this wonderful revolutionary, but (with luck and hard
work) can help direct our attention and energies into a hopeful future.

[1] The “dual revolution” concept is highlighted in Eric
Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848
(New York: Vintage Books, 1996), and a succinct survey of the rise, within this
context, of the workers’ movement of which Luxemburg was part can be found in
Wolfang Abendroth, A Short History of the
European Working Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). For a useful
new collection of Luxemburg’s writings, see Peter Hudis and Keven B. Anderson,
eds., The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), which, in combination with volumes edited by
Le Blanc and Waters cited below, provides the bulk of what is available to
English-language readers.

[2] Quoted by Richard Hyman, “Marxism and the Sociology
of Trade Unionism,” Trade Unions Under
Capitalism, ed. by Tom Clarke and Laurie Clements (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977),
389. The range of Luxemburg’s thought, and key aspects of her biography and
personality, are elaborated in Paul Le Blanc, ed., Rosa Luxemburg, Reflections and Writings (Amherst, NY: Humanity
Books, 1999), which on pages 256–257 includes a somewhat different translation
of this passage from Luxemburg’s “Speech to the Founding Convention of the
Communist Party.”

[3] Mary Nolan, Social
Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890–1920
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Other works that do this include
Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture:
Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), and William Pelz, The
Spartakusbund and the German Working-Class Movement, 1914–1919 (Lewiston,
NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987).

[4] The fundamental continuity in the orientation of Marx
and Luxemburg (along with Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci) is indicated in Paul
Le Blanc, From Marx to Gramsci: A Reader
in Revolutionary Marxist Politics (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996).